Wireless communication apparatuses, such as, cell phones, often adjust the rate of data to be transmitted according to transmission environment or the like. For example, in communication technologies of the Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) and the High Speed Packet Access (HSPA), which are standardized by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), when transmitting encoded data, a radio communication apparatus applies a rate matching process to the bit sequence obtained after error correction encoding.
For error correction, for example, HSPA uses a turbo code with a coding rate of ⅓ to generate 2-bit parity bits per bit information. Then, in the rate matching process, a transmitter performs thinning-out of bits (puncturing) from an error correction encoded bit sequence or performs repeating of bits (repetition), depending on the quality of a transmission path. In addition, a receiver performs error correction decoding on a bit sequence after the rate matching process.